iDidn't Know It Was You
by twowritehands
Summary: In a lot of ways, he was still waiting...  SEDDIE a glimpse of the past SHORT AND SWEET


**Mass posting for CABAL writers! Check out the link in our profile and read more awesome SEDDIE stories!**

_AN: School started back and this semester's got heavy reading assignments so we went and ran smack out of time to work on any of the really big awesome stories we got in the works. THEY ARE COMING SLOWLY BUT SURELY SO STAY TUNED! Meanwhile, this is a little thing we've had sitting around a for a little while...hope you enjoy!_

**iDidn't Know It Was You**

There's a special way you know someone that you've gone to school with your entire life. It's different than how you know the kids who moved in later, even as early as elementary school. Just because they weren't there for primary school, a certain something is missing, those random memories that float to the surface when you are reminded of the second grade—was that _her_, you always think; or I can't believe he was ever that small; or oh yeah, they were friends then….

For Freddie Benson, when kindergarten was recalled, he remembered brightly colored reading circle rugs, sand boxes, and the red power ranger.

It'd been Halloween, and all the boys were dressed as power rangers and all the girls were dressed as fairies or angels or princesses.

On the playground, he'd made a new friend who was so much more fun than his other friends—a red power ranger who never took off the mask, who talked in a robotic voice the entire time, who invited him to join the most awesome adventure he'd ever had on the jungle gym.

He still couldn't set eyes on the primary school playground without recalling this game, that friend, or how scary it was when his friend fell from the very top and everyone heard the bone snap.

The teacher's had rushed over. The other kids had gathered in a tight circle. When the teachers removed the helmet, a mess of golden curls had tumbled out, and angry blue eyes screamed for her mother.

"You're a _girl_?" he'd asked, dumbfounded.

She hadn't answered, but cried more and threw dirt at the people who were laughing. An ambulance came, the teachers lectured everyone about jungle-gym safety, but Freddie had heard none of it. His hot breath had filled the small space behind his cheap plastic red helmet, and he was smiling ear to ear and laughing.

Freddie had climbed to the very bar that she'd tumbled from and there he'd sat for the rest of recess and the one after, waiting for the coolest girl he'd ever met to come back to finish the game.

In a lot of ways, he was still waiting.

The red power ranger never returned. He'd found her again at the swing set, wearing pink and sparkly sandals and she hadn't wanted to climb the monkey bars because she was wearing a dress. He'd only been six; he hadn't known that the absence of a cast on her right arm meant something.

He got mad at her, hadn't talked to her again for the rest of the year, stayed on the other side of the playground, approached her only when she drew a crowd in the sand box because she was eating sand on a dare, but then the next day she was swapping Barbie lunch boxes at lunch.

One day she was a tom boy, the next a priss.

He might have played with her regardless, but the other boys said the color pink meant koodies and they wouldn't get near him if he talked to her, so in the end it had been his need for friends who wanted to play power rangers that had kept him from getting to know the princess.

After a couple of years, she seemed to make up her mind to be the tom boy, and he never saw her in a dress again, but he'd already forgotten that red power ranger in wake of technology. In the eighth grade he learned her name, Sam Puckett. She was mean and crude and he had no reason to associate her with the imaginative friend he'd made on the playground, until one day after iCarly rehearsal when she mentioned off-handedly the time she'd broken her arm falling from the monkey bars in Kindergarten.

In a flash, Freddie remembered the blonde curls that the helmet had hid until the teachers removed it. That _was_ her, wasn't it? And holy chiz, the girly princess had been _Mel_. Ahha, that was hilarious.

He smiled fondly as he realized that he had as much fun these days doing iCarly as he had once upon a time on the monkey bars, and it was partly because Sam was there shaking things up a bit and spinning her own flavor into everything. He experienced a fascinating sensation of relief, of closure.

He could stop waiting.

**fin.**

_AN: so yeah, I guess its a ficlet about the pivotal moment in Freddie's life when he stopped hating Sam and picked right back up where he'd left off on the playground-worshiping her as the coolest girl ever :P Let us know what you think of this and all our other stuff, pretty freaking please? :)_

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